Fisheries

The fisheries sector comprises the wild harvesting of freshwater or marine aquatic life, for food, sport or commercial sale, as well as the cultivation of aquatic life (aquaculture), and the rearing of wild-born fish (ranching).

Fish comprise an important part of the diet of humans, especially in developing countries. Fish, in the form of meal, are also an important feed constituent for farmed fish such as salmon, and for poultry. Capture fishing and aquaculture employ typically less than 1% of the working populace in industrialized countries, but a significant share of the populace in some of the world’s least-developed countries.

Direct impacts of fishing on the environment arise through the harvesting of aquatic life, including non-target species (bycatch) such as seabirds. Indirect impacts can include damage to benthic habitats from fishing gear, damage to coastal zones from pollution related to intensive aquaculture, and the emission of air pollutants and greenhouse gases associated with the fuel used to power fishing vessels.

Fishing, like farming, has a long history of government intervention and support. Adam Smith, for example, mentioned per-tonne payments that were being made to the herring and whale fisheries in Scotland when he was writing his treatise on economics, The Wealth of Nations, in the late 1700s. Since that period, government programs to support marine capture fisheries have grown in scale and complexity.

The 1950s and 1960s saw a surge in subsidies to marine capture fishing by countries keen on rebuilding commercial fishing industries decimated by the Second World War, and to augment food supplies. With the extension of national exclusive economic zones (EEZs) out to a maximum of 200 nautical miles, a process which began in the early 1980s, many countries began subsidizing the construction of fishing vessels and fishing-related infrastructure in order to take advantage of the fishing opportunities created by the departure of foreign-flag vessels from their EEZs.

By the 1990s, awareness of the contribution that subsidies, exacerbated by inadequate management of fish stocks, were making to over-fishing began to affect national policies. Today, some 20% of global revenue from the fisheries industry comes from subsidies. According to the FAO, around 75 % of the world's commercial fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited or significantly depleted.

Support to fishing is provided largely through government expenditure on ports, subsidies for vessel modernization, subsidies or tax waivers on fuel, government-to-government payments for access to another country’s EEZ (also called “access payments”) that are not fully recovered from such access, and income support for commercial fishers during periods when fishing is banned or disrupted. Several hundred million dollars a year are also now being spent on decommissioning fishing vessels, buying up surplus licenses, and helping to retrain fishers for other occupations. In absolute terms, the bulk of fishing subsidies is provided by the governments of OECD countries, and a few large developing countries.

Information on support to fishing varies considerably among countries. The Commission for the European Communities also periodically issues reports detailing expenditure under its main programmes, the FIFG (shortly to be replaced by the European Fisheries Fund); the Common Organisation of Markets for Fish (price support); the Structural Fund; access arrangements; and Member State payments.

At the international level, member economies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) are supposed to report subsidies to fishing in their official notifications. However, studies by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have shown that numerous subsidy programmes are not being reported. Reporting of subsidies provided by sub-national governments - states, provinces, prefectures - is virtually non-existent. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) collects, and reports in a standardized format, data on “government financial transfers” to commercial fishing provided by the national governments of its 30 member countries. This series is complete back to 1996.

Subsidies to fishing are disciplined under the WTO’s Agreement on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures, but to date no fish subsidies have ever been challenged in a formal case brought before the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body. In the WTO Ministerial Declaration of 14 November 2001 (the basis for the WTO’s current round of multilateral trade negotiations), negotiators were instructed to “clarify and improve WTO disciplines on fisheries subsidies, taking into account the importance of this sector to developing countries.” As of July 2006, when the Doha Round negotiations were suspended, considerable progress towards crafting new disciplines on fisheries subsidies had been made. Significantly, the negotiations had shifted from whether there should be additional disciplines on subsidies to what these additional disciplines should look like.

Unfortunately, with the Doha Round negotiations in abeyance, consensus on a final text remains elusive, and the probability that new, tighter international disciplines on fish subsidies will enter into force any time soon is low.